In the News (Tue 3 Mar 15)

Language is an ever evolving process on planet Earth varying from culture to culture and place to place depending on the needs of the civilization that existed at that timeline.

Language is a system of conventional spoken or written symbols by means of which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture, communicate.

The languages of North Asia are those spoken from the Arctic Ocean on the north to South Asia and China on the south and from the Caspian Sea and Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east.

Herodotus lists Sogdiana in a list of nations subject to the Achamaenid kings, and according to other Greek sources, the limits of Sogdiana are the Oxus river in the south and the Jaxartes in the north.

This language is considered one of the most important of the eastern Iranianlanguages due to its significance as a vehicle of culture, literature, and commerce.

The territory of Sogdian language bordered on the area of Persian speech in the west and extending the walls of China in the east.

Some languages with a limited number of speakers and/or not described by previous investigators are not identified individually, but are put together with an indication of a general linguistic group as a common label.

The interference with the Church Slavonic as a sacred language.

The mixture of languages and the elements of the Korean-English pidgin.

EASTERN IRANIANLANGUAGES, term used to refer to a group of Iranianlanguages most of which are or were spoken in lands to the east of the present state of Persia.

Thus Ossetic, an Eastern Iranianlanguage, is spoken in the Caucasus, further west than many Western Iranianlanguages, while Baluchi (q.v.), a North-Western Iranianlanguage, is spoken chiefly in Pakistan, in the south-eastern corner of the Iranophone area.

While Western Middle Iranian is represented by Middle Persian and Parthian, the chief Eastern Middle Iranianlanguages are Khotanese (with the closely related Tumshuqese), Sogdian, Chorasmian, and Bactrian, to which one may add the remnants of such languages as Sarmatian and Alanic (R. Bielmeier in Schmitt, pp.

Iranianlanguages are applied to a group of inter-related languages which only from linguistic point of view, share common characteristics, and not in terms of geographical and political borders.

Text: The term "Iran" is derived from three separate words throughout the history of the Farsi language: From the middle Farsi word `Eran'; from the ancient Farsi word `Ariya', and from the Avesta Farsi word `Airya', which itself is derived from the ancient Persian word `Arya'.

It comes from the adjective `ariya - raman' IRANIANLANGUAGEIranianlanguages are applied to a group of inter-related languages which only from linguistic point of view, share common characteristics, and not in terms of geographical and political borders.

The Iranian Prophet Zoroaster is considered by numerous scholars as the founder of the earliest religion based on revealed scripture.

However, the Iranianlanguages and their various dialects (est.150-200 million speakers) exceed the Iranian borders and are spoken throughout western China, southern Russia, and eastern Turkey.

Iranian culture was long the predominant culture of the Middle East, with Persian considered the language of intellectuals during much of the second millennium A.D. Nearly all philosophical, scientific, or literary work of the Islamic empires was written in or translated to Persian as well as Arabic.

Old Iranian, which is closely related to Sanskrit is known from the Avesta (the sacred book of Zoroastrians) and from Old Persian cuneiform inscriptions of the Achaemenid Emperors.

All Iranianlanguages currently spoken show a simplification of the earlier sound systems and a preference for the use of auxiliary verbs in place of the complex verb conjugations of the ancient Iranianlanguages.

Tajik is an offspring of the Persian language, and belongs - along with Afghanistan's Dari - to the Eastern dialects of Persian.

The language has diverged somewhat from Persian as spoken in Afghanistan and Iran, because of political borders and the influence of Russian, although a transcribed Tajik text is easily understood by a native Persian speaker of either Iran or Afghanistan.

The standard language is based on the north-western dialects of Tajik, which have been influenced by the neighbouring Uzbek language as a result of geographical proximity.

This file lists e-mail distribution lists devoted primarily to the linguistic study of individual languages and groups of languages (though a couple of others, in particular lists for language learners, have been included as well).

COMPARLINGAFRIC is opened to topics where comparative linguistics in African languages of the Sahel-Sahara zone are the subject of discussion, such as: Languages and language families of the Sahel-Sahara zone: (Mande, Chadic, Berber, Nilo-Saharan...); genetic relationships; the description of changes in the context of languages of oral tradition; linguistic changes and factors concerning language transformation.

You have reached the third page of Indo-Iranian languages, which is just one part of the "Language Finger" homepage, which is an index by language to the holdings of the Mansfield Library of The University of Montana.

The language belongs to the Dardic sub-branch of the Indic sub-branch of the Indo-Iranian sub-branch of the Indo-European branch of the Indo-Hittite family of languages.

Sinhalese is the official language of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon).

www.lib.umt.edu /guide/lang/indirn3h.htm (1537 words)

Iran(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)

Iranian budget deficits have been a chronic problem, in part due to large-scale State subsidies -- totaling some $7.25 billion per year -- including foodstuffs and especially gasoline.

Main article: Demographics of Iran The majority of Iran's people speak one of the Iranianlanguages, though only Persian is an official language.

Thus the Iranian considers himself the proud inheritor and guardian of an ancient sophisticated culture.

The mainstay of the department remains its many courses in Russian language and culture, followed by a fairly even balance of courses in Slavic languages and culture, Chinese language and culture, Japanese language and culture, Celtic languages and culture, the English language (especially as a second language), and linguistics.

Some audiovisual materials dealing with language are bought for the library, but it is not an area of large emphasis because a language lab on campus also acquires audiovisual materials on language learning.

While many courses involve modern languages, the area of general linguistics studies languages over time and the antecedents of modern language, so that archaic languages and philology are required.

Jewish-Languages Mailing List: October 2001(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)

The list is mostly "square script" except for the epigraphic and Samaritan sections.

This list of languages written in Hebrew is not yet complete: it does not include several central Iranian Jewish dialects (Kashani, Isfahani, Yazdi, and Kermani), Maltese in Hebrew, Genizah Latin in Hebrew, or Portuguese in Hebrew.

I assume that you are referring to the language known in Israel as Maroka'it, and not to Ladino.

The aim of a language documentation is to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community.

This definition of the aim of a language documentation differs fundamentally from the aim of language descriptions: a language description aims at the record of A LANGUAGE, with "language" being understood as a system of abstract elements, constructions, and rules that constitute the invariant underlying structure of the utterances observable in a speech community.

Language and Popular Culture in Africa is an internet-based project which aims to document the expressions of popular language and culture in Africa.

www.ldc.upenn.edu /exploration/archives.html (1241 words)

Amazon.com: The World's Major Languages: Books: Bernard Comrie(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)

Its best use would seem to be in an academic reference collection, for the scholar to dip into to refresh his or her memory of a language once studied, or to get a birds-eye view of a language not studied.

The articles, all written by specialists in the language in question, are excellent, the typeface is very pleasant, and the binding is highly durable, suitable for constant use.

List of kings of Persia (via CobWeb/3.1 planetlab2.cs.virginia.edu)(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13)

Their language was neither Semitic nor Aryan, and they were the geographic precursors of the Persian/Mede Empire that later appeared.

Some have offered evidence for a linguistic kinship between Elamite and the modern Dravidian languages of Southern India, but this is not universally accepted.

The recent archeological findings at Jiroft have uncovered an "independent, bronze age, civilization with its own architecture and language" that have led Some archeologists to speculate it to be the remains of the lost Aratta Kingdom.

Now as far as the name of the language goes, Persian is one of the five Iranianlanguages: Avestan, Old Persian, Pahlavi, Parthian, and Eastern Iranian.

The Sassanians then made it the official language and upon the Arab conquest, it became the only survivor of the Iranianlanguages.

So the language in its purer form was called Parsi and only the Arabs replaced the P with an F as they did many other words and it became Farsi which is only what the Arabs called our language, and now we let the world adopt it.